A lot about reading - 6 Dec 2019

Friday 6 December 2019

This came up in a newsletter today, a story about Heller and Vonnegut have a conversation at a billionaire's party. Enough

Reading Brave New Work and wondering about autonomy (pp 78-79) for distributed Brave teams and what our real identity is as an org: are we just building the tech and hoping others are going to implement it, use it etc. What if we didn't invent *a* model for people, we just wrote about it and shared it and let people do different things with it: franchise-like, without any agreement, as a salesperson, as a startup, a non-profit etc. All the things. This would allow us to partner deeply with some organisations, to be software licensor to another, a named supplier for yet another and so on...

I have finally put all the updated docs on the website (and on the share drive), so everyone should have access to the latest and greatest. Old docs are still filed in the archive so hopefully I didn't break any existing links...

Linking to my favourite book of the past year or so, in case you haven't heard me go on about it: Winners Take All. Very appropriate for the conversation we were having last week about concentration of wealth, the role of the financial services industry (which is largely why I left it) but also the failure of the philanthropic community to effect change (because the only meaningful changes are ones that would harm those supporting the change so...) His initial speech, The Thriving World, the Wilting World and You, on this was catalytic for me when I first read it in 2015. (Two coincidences: Mike Rowlands just wrote about listening to him talking in SF the other week, and it just came out that McKinsey did some pretty egregious consulting for ICE.)

But also, if you want to get into the money side of all this, there's Debt: the First 5,000 Years, Boomerang (by Michael Lewis) as well as anything on complementary currencies (Michael Linton's LETS and the writings of Lietaer are good starting points - although apparently they didn't see too much commonality in their thinking), universal basic income (check out Scott Santens). And just for fun there's the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by the amazing Cory Doctorow (which features the fun reputation currency, Whuffie.) I also started a whole project based around an idea to impact this but never found my key use-case or any early adopters, so I dropped it. If anyone is actually reading this you can ask me for it and I'll email you the project document...

Just finished Range, by David Epstein, and really enjoyed it, so wanted to endorse here. The core thesis is that we need generalists - both in individual form, and organisationally. There’s a shocking amount of stuff in there that’s relevant to us, as an org, in terms of the need to allow cross-polination of ideas and so on. (Which pairs nicely with the other book I’m reading, Brave New Work, which talks about the need to be ‘complexity conscious’ - meaning that there is no one system, for all the time, for all the work, and it’s wise to be conscious of that as we try to design the “right” system for ourselves etc.)

I thought that some of the team would appreciate this quote from the founder of Gore-Tex, that comes right at the end of Range: “innovation happens during crisis, because that when interdisciplinary walls break down.”

Here’s a video of the author asking “are athletes getting faster, better, stronger” - which was part of his previous book. This new one grew out of his discovery that the majority of professional athletes didn’t start early, but we tend to believe the “head start” model of excellence. When in fact that’s the exception rather than the rule.